Home Plate

Pizza pot pie plays with expectations

In a pie kind of town, Chicago Pizza and Oven Grinder Co. dishes it in a bowl

January 05, 2012|By Jennifer Day, Special to the Tribune

In the temples of Chicago pizza, you have your Great Lake worshipers, your Burt Katz devotees and the general sectarian divide among the Gino's East/Giordano's/Lou Malnati's deep-dish clans. But head to a quiet strip of North Clark Street in Lincoln Park, and you'll stumble upon a pizza cult like none other.

The crowds that flock to the Chicago Pizza and Oven Grinder Co. have come for a peculiar specimen known as the pizza pot pie. The pies come in two sizes — the half-pounder or the 1-pounder — and are served by a battalion of servers wearing oven mitts. Straight out of the kitchen, the pizza pot pies look like giant mushrooms (or, depending on whom you ask, alien pods or Smurf houses). But that's just a cap of bread covering a ceramic bowl that holds the rest of the goods — all of which is revealed once the server deftly flips the pot pie over and onto a plate. A quick swipe of a spoon around the bowl's edge dislodges a steaming mess of sauce and cheese into the crust's hollow.

"It's amazing," say Sophie Beaman and Kate Oosterhof in unison. The two Australian women were passing through Chicago on a recent post-college road trip and stopped in for pizza pot pies.

"It's like a mixture between spaghetti Bolognese and pizza. There's nothing like it," Beaman says. "It tastes like a home-cooked meal."

The pizza pot pie is the brainchild of Albert H. Beaver, the restaurant's owner. Beaver said he bought the Chicago Pizza and Oven Grinder Co. building after a fire gutted it in 1971. Beaver and his carpenter friend Charles Smital outfitted the restaurant with its signature white cedar and yellow pine.

For the menu, Beaver wanted to create something surprising. He started thinking about how he had never heard of a pizza pot pie, so he did some research in cookbooks and developed his own recipe.

The pizza pot pies are still made with the same recipe that the restaurant used when it opened in 1972, said general manager Catherine Gallanis. The sauce is made from scratch each day and simmered for eight hours. For the meat version of the pot pie, ground pork sausage is added. For each order, Wisconsin brick cheese is placed in the ceramic bowl. The sauce is spooned on top and — if customers prefer — a couple of whole mushrooms are added. A white or whole wheat crust is draped over the top of the bowl before it goes into the oven.

"I can't even make it at home like you can there," says Beaver, who lives in Wisconsin and is no longer involved with the day-to-day operation of the restaurant. "The ovens are special."

To a skeptic, the pizza pot pie might resemble a bread bowl filled with spaghetti sauce and a raft of melted cheese. But an informal survey on a recent Friday night found that loyal pizza pot pie fans believe it to be something transcendent. The most common word used to describe the pot pies was "awesome."

Mary and Bill Hennings, of south suburban Frankfort, have been regular customers since shortly after the restaurant opened. The couple makes the 55-minute drive several times a year, including on special occasions. And every time, they say, they order the same thing: salad, Mediterranean bread — a flatbread sprinkled with Italian seasonings — and half-pound pizza pot pies.

"It used to be they'd know me when I'd walk in the door," Bill says, noting that the staff always knew he liked less cheese, so they'd take some of it from his pot pie and give it to his wife.

The restaurant's other marquee menu item — hot grinders served in nicely crisped buns — are slightly more conventional, but at least as tasty as the pot pies. The meatball grinder is particularly satisfying.

Part of the charm of the Chicago Pizza and Oven Grinder Co. is its quirkiness. It sits on the lower floor of a town house, giving it an almost subterranean feel. The garage where the 1929 St. Valentine's Day Massacre occurred used to sit across the street. (It's now a parking lot.) As the menu says, "according to neighborhood legend — Al Capone's under-world demons once peered across Clark Street toward a bloody garage" from the building that now houses the restaurant.

A photo of the street from the 1930s hangs in the entrance, but you might have to elbow people out of the way to see it. On a recent weekend night, the foyer was packed. Despite the crowd, the hosts stuck to the restaurant's tradition: They greet customers and ask how many people are in the party, but they never write down names. The hosts rely on memory, pointing at customers when it's time to head to a table.

It's a tradition that began with the restaurant: It's more personal to remember an individual than to just call out a name, Gallanis says. And there are tricks to it: Longtime host Jesus Hernandez says he memorizes shoes or jewelry.

On the night of our visit, the estimated wait was 45 minutes for two people. Customers checked their watches and bonded over whether the host would remember them.

"I'd feel better if he took names."

"He just looks at you and he knows," says a woman reassuringly to no one in particular.

"Yeah, but how does he know?"

Later, the reassuring woman gets the server's nod. It's her turn to eat.

"See," she says as she leaves pizza purgatory, "I'm telling you it works."